NOVELIST. JOURNALIST. STUDENT. TEACHER.

The Green Beat

The Green Beat was an environmental journalism course I took at Emory University in spring 2015 with Dr. Sheila Tefft, a senior lecturer in Emory’s discontinued journalism program.

Healthy Human Habitats — Charleston, SC—In this blog, we were instructed to determine if our hometowns could be considered a “healthy human habitat” based on Howard Frumkin’s TEDx talk devoted to the idea, and explain our findings to a general audience. I critiqued Charleston, South Carolina’s air quality, water quality, and access to food and public transportation.

Emory WaterHub Reclamation Plant—Our class had the opportunity to visit Emory University’s state-of-the-art water reclamation plant on campus. This blog explains the purpose of the plant, the technology that goes into purifying the water, and the future of sustainable water practices based on interviews with WaterHub’s environmental engineer and manager.

Urban Wildlife Conservation—In this op-ed, I argue that urban wildlife offers important and tangible benefits to city dwellers, from our economies, to our ecosystems, to our health. I also offer several examples and ways for children, adults, and communities to celebrate and protect their local urban wildlife.

For my final project, I decided to focus on exploring pollinator conservation in Atlanta, Georgia. As such, I had the opportunity to interview and learn from local experts, from the Georgia Institute of Technology to the U.S. Forest Service. In my feature story, I outline the history of the decline of local pollinators, their critical importance to food security and nutrition, several reasons for their decline, and what solutions are being explored. I also created a podcast on the topic. Read the podcast script here!